Falling Down the Blank
by greenboredom
Summary: Follows Bucky after the events of CA:TWS. "He's used to his own anger, it feeling like it's fused to his brain, the constant anger. Now, though, he's more frustrated and scattered, he's failed his mission, lost his objectives, ran away and hid." Not sure where I am heading with this one. It feels like some poorly written character study at the point being, but bear with me.
1. Chapter 1

He can't get the stench of the Winter Soldier off him.

It's that stench that follows him to the hide-out, it's what makes him close his eyes and feel his own body the most accurate he can remember himself feeling, probably ever, or just since the last blank came. It's the way he aches from head to toes and outright hurts in his flesh and blood arm's middle area.

It's how all that and the headache and bruised muscles and cracked ribs can't make him stop smelling the putrid flow of old sweat and blood, dirt and smoke and death, all over himself. His pores seem to swim in it and it tingles under his skin, pulses in his brows, echoes in his emptied mind.

His hair is matted and messy, unclean and unkempt, spreading not any less harsh an aroma, making him cringe in distaste. His one half wants to hack it away and get rid of that mess, the other half, however, needs it to be even longer and to hide him away from the unknown space surrounding him. Hide him from the world, or maybe himself.

It is not any less easy than ever to be re-born into a different world, more and more alien to him every time he emerges from the cold. He feels as angered with himself as he does every time his mission ends and he doesn't understand what is it all for. They tell him it's for a good cause. He doesn't know what good or a cause is anymore. He still carries on with his missions every time 'cause he's good at it. 'Cause he has to. 'Cause they need him to and if he doesn't, there will be punishment.

He's used to his own anger, it feeling like it's fused to his brain, the constant anger. Now, though, he's more frustrated and scattered, he's failed his mission, lost his objectives, ran away and hid as a shadow between all the carnage and smoke and people, who didn't even see him, all wet from the river's waters and dirty and broken. His metal arm was whirring loud and harsh in the empty walls he ended up in, his blood pumping in his ears and leaving a nasty taste in his foul feeling mouth.

He stood and flinched when his flesh arm sent a crack and a jolt of burning pain right up to his shoulder. He had to right the bone and fix it in place, to immobilize it and wait for a quick healing process to kick in, just as he knew it would work. He would have otherwise been taken to a place where people pushed him and prodded him and patched him after his missions found their endings. Now he didn't have anywhere else to go, he knew.

What he didn't know was what to do with himself. He found this place emptied in a hurry and completely trashed, heaps of papers and files having been burnt in one corner. His handlers ran away and left him to be. He failed his mission after all, he failed to win and he lost. Maybe they just assumed he would be gone by now, destroyed, disposed of, just as he himself thought his last target would have done. And why didn't he?

It would have been so easy to just leave him under the fallen construction piece of the helicarrier, just have him left there to be burned or drowned. To be rid of, without any problems. And yet the man saved him and refused to fight him and called him names that made him feel more lost and scared and angry than he ever recalled feeling. Feeling, as it is, was irrelevant and new to him, but right then, after his mission went all the way bad and not the way he would have predicted, he felt terrified and he didn't know why.

It was so new and just wrong that he lost it and unleashed his strength and confusion and all the power he still had at the man, not only to try and make this right and complete his mission, but to silence the man and his words. They made him burn and shake inside and he didn't want that anymore. So he rushed and made impact and took blows to the target's unprotected head, until he suddenly stopped.

He didn't know why he did, he just couldn't continue anymore, 'cause it still felt wrong, just wrong, and he didn't know what was right anymore. And the man looked at him, still looked, with one eye shutting down after the numerous beats and cracks. And he still talked to him, the man gave up and still told him he was with him. 'Til the end of the line. And it cracked him more than any of the blows he'd had ever received, it made him stumble over his one-way thought process of kill and eliminate and just stop with his metal fist still raised in the air, ready to make the final deadly strikes.

These never came, and he felt the moment to go on, and he knew that instant that he didn't hear those words for the first time. It was the same ghost-like certainty, as the time when he thought that he knew the man, flashing through his crazed and mangled thoughts. He didn't remember or know anything, except for the fact that he knew he should have remembered. It was the same feeling that he sensed when he thought about himself and wondered if there was something before the mission, and before that.

He wasn't yet finished grappling with those thoughts before there was a blast and the glass under him crumbled, taking the man away with it in a burst of debris and parts of the burning helicarrier. It was only because he still held the metal hand ready for striking the man, that he managed to grab and hold himself and not fall as well. But it felt wrong, again so wrong, now looking at the man, a little figurine flying away, tumbling down through the air and becoming smaller and smaller, him watching.

It seemed that moment that they were in the wrong places, that he himself should have been the one falling down, always falling, never catching the hand that was extended to him, and always disappearing into the depth of nothingness, into the cold. He felt his veins fill with blood and his muscles flexed, and his mind was splitting into two – one part watching and the other falling. Soon he did just that.

He let go or he jumped, and at the same instant he was in free fall, so familiar it stung his eyes and made him grit his teeth, when he entered the dirty stream of the river and plunged under the surface. He went down like he was a stone whose aim was the very bottom of the river. He almost reached it, his lungs not feeling the strain he thought he should have felt, and he grabbed the man in his ever strong metal grip and didn't let go until they both resurfaced.

He pulled the heavy body from the water and leaned in to make sure that he was still breathing. The man was, albeit heavily, and he suddenly felt the same loss and fear creeping up his disjointed mind. He struggled with himself for a second and then backed away from the bank of the river, dripping water and feeling empty and yet filled with ripples of total confusion, messing up his already muddled brain. As aimless as he felt, he still had the basic regulations drained inside into his very skull, to go and seek a hide-out, so he did just that.

Now, staying in the hidden building floor underneath the ground, he searched for some thought or order or even a sense of feeling the way ahead. But none came. He was angry and scared, and he hated the mix, so foreign to him and so unwelcome. The events and the words that passed him in these last days drilled through his mind painfully when he tried to rest. He couldn't sleep and although no physical pain hindered him so – he was used to it after all – he knew that the ache he felt wasn't of physical nature, it was in his mind.

Fighting the impulse to make a blow to the wall or to his own head to silence the flashes and the words he instead tried to get some sleep, dreading the way he just knew it would not be as dreamless as he would have liked.


	2. Chapter 2

He woke up screaming that night.

Or was it a day? It was hard to tell underground. His voice was hoarse, and his throat hurt, and he had tears in his eyes and sweat on his trembling lips, twisted into a grimace he felt so foreign on his face, as every expression of feelings was ever foreign to him. He sensed that his flesh hand was shaking too and lifted it up to his eyes disbelievingly. He didn't know why it did.

He didn't know much, and he never had, just his priorities for a mission, just where to go after it, when to obey and when to lie down and wait for what else they decided to do with him, in order for him to be a more useful weapon. That's what he was. But not anymore. He felt weak and, unlike the left arm made of crude metal, he felt the weakness of his human flesh more than any time before.

Human. Was he human? He never felt that. He only knew he had to be successful in his missions and to return to the base, and to be ready for whatever they ordered him to memorize and carry out with precision and total efficiency. Now he didn't have that. His mission failed, he failed, new orders never came, and he knew he'd had spent two days here, all closed off and wary of footsteps coming for him, that never echoed between the desolate walls.

He was alone and he searched for the meaning of the word in his head. He had always been alone, he never had any accomplices, only people who made the orders, people who targeted at him, people who ran or screamed, people who made him scream. Now nobody was punishing him for his failure and he was feeling a sense of gratefulness for it, but he never knew when the pain would come again. And it would, it always did, bringing with it the oblivion and the cold.

Now he felt the ache and the chill in his healing arm but he didn't feel the cold enveloping him whole, asphyxiating him alive, and that was what he was grateful for. He suddenly felt almost animalistic need to be clean again and so he went to look around the station he was at. He also felt a need for sustenance, and with having nobody around telling him he couldn't eat or drink, until he understood the importance of a successful mission, with nobody making a point clear that he was not to eat or sleep or talk, until someone allowed him, he wanted to do just that.

He wanted, really wanted for the first time he could remember, and he let the feeling flow through him, bringing warmth with it. After some searching around, he found a closed but not locked door, behind which was a small room. It was almost empty but for some shelves, and he found two pieces of old bread in them and ate it in one go. He chased after the smell of the water and heard the sounds of it dripping, finding another narrow door, leading to a makeshift shower.

He saw some discarded clothes next to it, unmarked and seemingly fresh, sweat pants and a long-sleeved hoodie, and he found a crumpled towel in the corner of the stall. He decided to use the shower, even if he suspected his dressing of the wound wouldn't have liked it. He still made that decision – a first constant decision he could clearly remember making – and slowly stripped off his stained and dirty clothing. He got rid of the belts and heavy leather, strong boots, rigid pants and the underwear, and at the last minute wrapped his flesh arm in an empty bag lying around.

He had his shower and he ached with cold water sluicing all over him, but that was ok, he was used to the cold and that way of showering. He even drank from the stream, feeling how his dry throat savored the slightly metallic taste. Soon, though, the water became almost warm and he was surprised by it, mechanically soaping his sweaty and grimy body, trying to get rid of the stench that still reminded him of what he had been.

The Winter Soldier were words repeated to him, or at him, on many occasions, and he associated those with his missions and the people he killed and the ones who tried to kill him, and mostly, with the cold again, the dark, and the constant pressure of oblivion in his brain. He sensed the title like the second skin on him, and now he tried to wash clean of it, never really knowing why.

But he knew he was the Winter Soldier no more, he failed his mission and his thoughts got mixed up with confusing feelings, and nobody was ordering him around anymore. He didn't know what he was, but he didn't feel attached to the title anymore either. He just didn't have a name, although he always had names delivered to him, of targets to eliminate. But they were his mission, and he was a shadow that went after those who had to be destroyed. That didn't make him anymore human than he would have wanted it to.

He finished the washing, and the water was really warm now, but he cut off the stream and got out of the stall to dry himself off. He turned left while putting on the pants and froze. He thought he saw a ghost but it was really a reflection of himself, blank and vague in a misted piece of mirror on the wall, showing his wild eyes and feral expression on the cut and bruised face. Dark wet hair was falling around it and dripping beads of water on his naked shoulders and he shivered minutely.

He couldn't take his eyes off the reflection he saw. It scared him, just like the words of the man had scared him back on the helicarrier. It made him want to smash that reflection and dent the wall and watch the little pieces of the mirror fall. He didn't know he had done just that, until there was a crash and little pieces of plaster and shards of mirror were lying all around and inside a small sink underneath. He trembled and he didn't know why, except for the metal hand that was steady and cold as ever, having not felt the connection it just made.

He felt himself bending down as in a bottomless dream he had just had a few hours earlier, where he fell and fell, down the blank space, never reaching any end. Feeling colder and colder until he froze alive, and he was plummeting still. Now he was numb inside, just like in that dream, watching himself turn to stone, and it made him want to scream and smash everything around him, leaving nothing unscathed, until he was left standing in the empty space like a lone survivor of the cold and long winter.

He suddenly knew what that meant, winter and cold, and snow all around him, painted with a red stream of blood, bright on the white and shiny surface. He felt sudden warmth and saw that he had a shard of the mirror pressed inside his flesh hand, cutting through the skin and making the red seep and trickle down the side of the sink. He felt nothing more, just warmth, and it enraged him. He clutched the shard, hard. He squeezed on it, until he felt burning in his fingers and sharp stinging in his palm, effectively cutting it open.

Now satisfied, he dropped the shard on the tiled ground and suddenly felt high with relief. He could still feel, he could still hurt, he was human after all. He could hurt, but he could heal too. He would make everything he could not to meet the people that used to own him, he suddenly decided. He had the strength and he had the power, and he would use it for defending himself against anyone who would want to take his newly found sense of humanity from him.

He still didn't know who he was, but he was somebody, he knew that, and he would search for that somebody until he found it. He didn't really know anyone who could help him along the way, unless he counted the man on the bridge that had talked to him, begged him, said things to him no other target had ever said before. He was no ordinary target, he was no ordinary mission, but one he had failed consciously, one person he had saved and not destroyed. If someone could make him aware of who he was, it was that man. He had to find him. That would be his new mission.


End file.
